
I am a network admin and computer instructor at a local school and I was looking for a solution that would enable me to remotely control student and staff machines for help desk related purposes. I did a little research and narrowed my choices down to TightVNC or UltraVNC. Ultra seemed the better choice in my opinion so I downloaded it and tried it out (I am using UltraVNC-100-RC203-Setup.exe). I was thrilled with how simple it was to install and use. I tried it with a few staff and now I want to move on to setting it up on the student machines. This is where my challenge lies...
Some miscellaneous info that may or may not have anything to do with what I'm trying to accomplish: I have a computer lab that has 12 Windows XP Professional machines running Deep Freeze (Deep Freeze should have no effect on what I want to accomplish because it will be thawed when I install and configure the software and it should run fine once I refreeze the machines). The machines are not connected to our domain (yborg), instead they are all using the workgroup feature with the name "yborg" (same as our domain name) and I have a universal login for the students at the server level. So when they login to their machines, they are essentially using passthrough authentication. I won't go into why I set it up this way, but I just wanted to give that info in case it may have bearing on how I go about installing and setting up the UltraVNC software on each machine.
What I'm trying to accomplish:
1. I would like to have it where the UltraVNC software starts up as soon as the student logs in to Windows
2. I would like the software to be running without them really seeing it or knowing it running. It would also be very nice to keep them from being able to kill it from the task manager. If this part of the configuration will be partly a permissions issue, I need to have a way for the software to atleast run while at the same time not allowing them to disable or configure the software in any way.
3. I would like to be able to remotely connect to their machines and disable control of their mouse and keyboard from their local machine so I have full control of the mouse and keyboard from my remote connection (It looks like this is a simple matter of just disabling local inputs in the server configuration)
Another question I have is about the three options in the server configuration portion: disable tray icon, disable clients options in tray icon menu, forbid the user to closedown WinVNC - these are all options that I WILL use to restrict what the students are able to do once the software is installed and running right?
Thank you to any and all who help me make sure I'm going about this the right way, it's very much appreciated
